Why Do Women Stand by their Womanizing Man?

Why do women stand by their womanizing man, like Hillary and Silda did with Bill and Eliot? Let’s take a closer look…

I was at breakfast on Saturday with my friend Sue and she wanted to know why I had not weighed in on rotten, duplicitous, dirty, lying, cheating husbands like Gov. Eliot Spitzer, Gov. James McGreevey and Bill Clinton. After I told her that she forget to name a few of the lying, cheatin’, money-grubbing wives of a few good men, she was resolute that I should write about why I think these women stand by their man at press conferences when he says that he’s sorry that he did what he did to hurt his wife and family—‘why are they standing there?’

I read more than 200 articles about Silda Wall Spitzer, Eliot’s wife—a Harvard lawyer and a worksbee for philanthropic causes and the mother of three girls—after Gov. Spitzer had his initial press conference pleading ‘poor judgment’, including many pieces rehashing the Clinton debacle as well as the resignation of New Jersey Gov. McGreevey and how his wife Dina reacted during and after his homosexual affair was made known.

To lay the tracks of the fact of the matter, attorneys almost always insist that wives stand at the podium with their husbands when extra-marital scandals bust wide open. The philosophy behind this is that if the public sees the wife standing with her husband at this most difficult and beyond embarrassing time the collective consciousness will accept what happened and let the chips fall where they may.

As far as the Bill Clinton affair with Monica Lewinsky goes, I want to remind all of you that Hillary Rodham Clinton pounced on the ‘right-wing conspiracy’ theory from day one, and denounced the notion that Bill Clinton had had an affair with ‘that woman’. Ah, those Clintons. Hillary painted herself into a corner and she stayed painted in because she had a bigger agenda than Bill’s peccadilloes; remember Bill had been known to fool around all his married life. Hillary knew that one day she was going to make a run for the Senate and the White House, so she bit her tongue and swallowed her pride. Make no mistake; she still stings from all those betrayals, but winning at all cost was the price she was willing to pay. If she loses the presidential race, God help him or he may decide to pick up his legacy and skedaddle.

Dina McGreevey was on Larry King the night after the Spitzer fiasco was plastered all over the news media. Her insights were very crisp and pointed: Spitzer should resign and Silda needed to move on. Dina has rebuilt her life because, as all women of gay husbands will tell you, how can a woman fight another man for her husband?

Lo and behold the New Jersey Star Ledger reported today that a former aide to Gov. James McGreevey, Theodore Pedersen had three-way sexual encounters with both the governor and his wife from 1999-2001. Pedersen says that they called them ‘Saturday Night Specials’. In the interest of fair and balanced reporting, neither the former governor nor his former wife has substantiated these allegations. But if true, ‘stand by your man’ has taken on a different meaning. ‘Stand by your man’ with another man? Go figure and stay tuned.

Silda is an interesting woman—and from the accounts I read—does her work and raises her children with zeal and passion—and certainly was never basking in Eliot’s reflected glory—as a matter of fact she did not want him to run for governor. As I wrote last week, from his astrological birth chart, Eliot Spitzer is not only an ego-maniac he is also a sex-addict. There were the dark and light forces struggling within Spitzer, like proverbially, God and the Devil fighting for man’s soul. Power inbreeds that old standard excuse about why someone would risk his career, subsequent disgrace as well as chance losing his marriage, which Dick Morris, a former Clinton strategist, wrote about Bill Clinton, Because He Could.

These very flawed powerful men in the public eye do the things they do not only because they can but because they feel ‘above it all’ and entitled to let the free range chicken within them cluck and pluck anyone they want to, anytime. Bill Clinton survived because he has no shame and because he was not going to leave the White House except carried out feet first. His spin doctors floated the notion that a man’s private life was between him and his wife.

I will give you the unconscious reason why these men have these affairs, right out of my new book, You’re Not Who You Think You Are—and it has to do with lack of male and female integration within a person. Within every man is the reflection of a woman and within every woman is the nature of a man, which Carl Jung and other of us in transpersonal psychology refer to as ‘one’s shadow’—I call it our dark side. If a man does not honor the feminine within him—fuse that nature with who he is—he will do dumb things like act out adulterously, or worse. (Some shadow selves have driven men to kill their wives rather than confess and get out of their elicit affairs). These adulterers have a problem with their shadow and because the unintegrated self wants to be recognized by the person, within whom she is operating, cause destructive behavior like infidelity.

Silda Wall Spitzer may love her husband in spite of the prostitution issue; she may even be able to forgive him. Swami Swahananda always says that when children are born they become the center of the family—all attention is given to their rearing and growing up foibles and problems. Wouldn’t it be absolutely amazing if this apparent disaster turned out to be a turning point in the Spitzer marriage? Wouldn’t it be beyond the pale if this disgrace was instead a new beginning of a new and redeemed Eliot Spitzer and his wife? I pray for them that it is, for perhaps they will be able to live their lives as more ordinary people, rededicated to making their lives work together. Stay tuned.